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Review

If Side Effects
is truly Steven Soderbergh’s farewell to theatrical filmmaking, he’s
going out in sly fashion, juggling tropes from his other movies, playing
games with your head based on what you think you know about him. He’s
on top of his material in a way he has rarely been in the last
decade—or, rather, in a way he has labored not to be. Soderbergh has
been conspicuously searching for new ways to tell stories, to dissolve
the boundaries between form and content, taking control of the camera
(under the name “Peter Andrews”) to be able to eliminate the middleman
and move into the action, to be present—in the same space—with his
characters. But the experiments now are ended. Side Effects is a smooth, shapely suspense picture.

Soderbergh opens with a Hitchcock-like traveling shot into
the window of a New York apartment building, where his camera picks up a
trail of blood. (There’s a lot—it looks serious.) Who died? We’re being
teased—we’ll have to wait. Three months earlier, Emily Taylor (Rooney
Mara) prepares for the release of her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum),
from prison, where he served several years for insider trading—a crime
that cost the couple their Greenwich manse and fancy friends. Emily is
visibly strung-out, giving off powerful suicidal vibes. Obviously, this
chick needs meds. And she gets them from an emergency-room psychiatrist,
Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who releases her on the condition she
see him privately. In the meantime, he’ll prescribe some selective
serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

The references to SSRIs and other anti­depressants and mood stabilizers come so fast that Side Effects appears to be Soderbergh’s plague movie, Contagion,
recast as social satire. (The screenwriter is the same, Scott Z.
Burns.) Everyone’s on something—Effexor, Wellbutrin, Zoloft. (I was
nodding along with the brand names, whispering, “I took that!”) Dr.
Banks has just moved into a high-priced apartment with his unemployed
wife, ­Dierdre (Vinessa Shaw), and young son, so when Big Pharma offers
him 50 grand to take part in a study for a new anti­depressant, he
accepts with alacrity. It’s not that he’s a sleaze. He’s a believer. He
pushes a beta-blocker on Dierdre, who’s paralyzed with fear over an
upcoming job interview. With these, he says, “it’s easier to be who you
are.” When poor, helpless Emily asks about a new pill that’s all the
rage, he thinks, “Why not?” And all at once she’s different.

Little more should be said about the plot, which at some
point takes a sharp turn into the noir terrain Soderbergh plumbed in his
1995 Criss Cross remake, Underneath. The movie’s great unknowable is Mara, an actress who seems most in her element at her most subterranean. Her face is a mask (Eyes Without a Face
swims to mind); there’s an instant’s hesitation between thought and
speech, as if her words have to travel up through water to the surface.
You can study that chiseled face with its pale, glassy peepers and feel
no closer to understanding her, but you get the feeling there’s something down there. Figuring out what is half the fun.

Jude Law, on the other hand, is appealingly superficial. His
career as a romantic lead having sputtered out, he can let his hair
recede, forget about striking movie-star poses, and do what he does very
well: studies in self-involvement. His Dr. Banks is an ordinary
man—decent, well meaning, casually corrupt but no more so than any other
shrink on the Big Pharma dole—who’s challenged on grounds he had no
idea even existed. A woman is unhappy? You talk, prescribe, ask how the
pills are working, prescribe something else to counter the side effects,
and send out a bill. In this case, he actually goes the extra mile: He
reaches out to Emily’s ­previous therapist, an electric eel named
­Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who eats him up with her eyes
and ­evidently enjoys—not unlike other kinds of ­pushers—standing on
street corners talking about drugs. Persecuted and abandoned, he’ll have
to stop thinking about everyone else and save his own hide.

In most of his films, Soderbergh comes off as a seeing brain,
with one thesis idea per movie and an unwillingness (or inability) to
change course when he knows that his thesis isn’t working. (My sense is
that he often knows; his main complaint about critics, oddly enough, is
that they’re too soft.) He’s not a one-trick pony, only a one-trick-per-show pony. But in Side Effects,
he’s mixing up conventions, playing cheerfully in the shallow end of
the pool. Here, as elsewhere, Soderbergh’s view of capitalist society is
jaundiced bordering on apocalyptic, but noir rewards cynicism as much
as it punishes romanticism. So happy endings—of a sort—are within reach.
His alleged last theatrical film is paranoid and hopeless, but he
leaves the field with a bounce in his step.
— David Edelstein